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Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World
The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated.
Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.
Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers.
Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.
Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.
Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers.
Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Paul Collins
13 books273 followersPaul Collins is a writer specializing in history, memoir, and unusual antiquarian literature. His ten books have been translated into a dozen languages, and include Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003) and The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2011). He lives in Oregon, where he is Chair and Professor of English at Portland State University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 104 reviews
September 14, 2017
E' rassicurante sapere che i no-vax, talebani-vegani, gli inventori folli, i pazzi-visionari, i millantatori seriali, gli imbonitori da palcoscenico, i falsari famosi, non sono frutto solo dell'epoca presente. Anzi, hanno illustri e affascinanti predecessori. Toglie quel retro pensiero strisciante, che trova sempre più credito, che tutto sia imputabile a Facebook e alla diffusione di internet. E invece no! Eravamo folli anche prima, e le folle (ma anche le élite) erano ben liete di farsi abbindolare.
Veasanton e la mania dei vetri blu, ricordano le varie mode dei braccialetti di rame, delle palline tibetane, la curcuma come panacea di tutti i mali, e tutte le mode ricorrenti che ogni tanto risalgono e fioriscono tra le menti belle e felici.
Il poeta-quasi-lauretato Tupper fa giustizia delle ricorrenti fame volatili dei nostri scribacchini contemporanei che assurgono alla gloria delle classifiche di vendita, presentandosi dai vari fabiofaziovespagramellinidurso, con cuori infranti, prose sincopate, numeri primi, montagne numerate (per citare uno strega classe 2017) e blabla blasonati.
Il pittore Banvard fa invece tenereza con i suoi diorami del Mississsippi, per la mole dell'opera e la sua assoluta caducità (al contrario, Botero piazza i suoi ciccioni/e ovunque nel tempo e nello spazio, godendo di una fama di sicuro meno meritata di Banvard). E Ireland probabilmente il più grande falsario di sempre (forse persino più di quelli che sostengono che Shakespeare non esiste, ed era la loro bis-bis-bis-bis-bisnonna che gli faceva da lavandaia). Symmes e la sua teoria delle sfere concentriche l'ho trovato pericolosamente precursore delle scie chimiche, ma molto più colto.
I Raggi N di Blondlot si pongono a fianco dei moderni santoni, tipo stamina.
Ma la lingua musicale universale di Sudre è affascinante nella sua folle impossibilità e inutilità.
C'è qualche intruso tra tanti matti, come Bull con la sua uva Concord, che ha lasciato il segno e il gusto, e l'affascinante Psalmanazar. E tutti gli altri di questa meravigliosa corte di miracoli.
Impressionante, come la Storia li dimentichi, seppellendoli sotto la polvere della cronaca.
Veasanton e la mania dei vetri blu, ricordano le varie mode dei braccialetti di rame, delle palline tibetane, la curcuma come panacea di tutti i mali, e tutte le mode ricorrenti che ogni tanto risalgono e fioriscono tra le menti belle e felici.
Il poeta-quasi-lauretato Tupper fa giustizia delle ricorrenti fame volatili dei nostri scribacchini contemporanei che assurgono alla gloria delle classifiche di vendita, presentandosi dai vari fabiofaziovespagramellinidurso, con cuori infranti, prose sincopate, numeri primi, montagne numerate (per citare uno strega classe 2017) e blabla blasonati.
Il pittore Banvard fa invece tenereza con i suoi diorami del Mississsippi, per la mole dell'opera e la sua assoluta caducità (al contrario, Botero piazza i suoi ciccioni/e ovunque nel tempo e nello spazio, godendo di una fama di sicuro meno meritata di Banvard). E Ireland probabilmente il più grande falsario di sempre (forse persino più di quelli che sostengono che Shakespeare non esiste, ed era la loro bis-bis-bis-bis-bisnonna che gli faceva da lavandaia). Symmes e la sua teoria delle sfere concentriche l'ho trovato pericolosamente precursore delle scie chimiche, ma molto più colto.
I Raggi N di Blondlot si pongono a fianco dei moderni santoni, tipo stamina.
Ma la lingua musicale universale di Sudre è affascinante nella sua folle impossibilità e inutilità.
C'è qualche intruso tra tanti matti, come Bull con la sua uva Concord, che ha lasciato il segno e il gusto, e l'affascinante Psalmanazar. E tutti gli altri di questa meravigliosa corte di miracoli.
Impressionante, come la Storia li dimentichi, seppellendoli sotto la polvere della cronaca.
October 13, 2011
This was a quite lovely read, about forgotten people in barely forgotten times. Only in America would we consider these gentlemen and gentlewomen to be 'losers', simply because they had an idea that others stole or their achievements have been forgotten by each succeeding generation. Some of them were just plain eccentrics, and I think we can look at the 21st century and see we have the same idealists today.
The title derives from John Banvard, who created grand works of art on rollout canvas, which drew standing-room only crowds in the 19th century. He shone before the age of cinema, which basically made his type of work obsolete. My favorite story was that of Rene Blondlot, a French scientist who 'discovered' the N-Ray, which really was nothing but some changes of light prisms. He believed deeply that he had discovered something extraordinary, and was subsequently laughed out of existence when his theory was disproved.
Here's to the 'losers'...bless them all.
Book Season = YearRound (enjoy!)
The title derives from John Banvard, who created grand works of art on rollout canvas, which drew standing-room only crowds in the 19th century. He shone before the age of cinema, which basically made his type of work obsolete. My favorite story was that of Rene Blondlot, a French scientist who 'discovered' the N-Ray, which really was nothing but some changes of light prisms. He believed deeply that he had discovered something extraordinary, and was subsequently laughed out of existence when his theory was disproved.
Here's to the 'losers'...bless them all.
Book Season = YearRound (enjoy!)
July 11, 2014
Ma io questa gente la voglio conoscere, la voglio invitare a cena!
Cominciamo però a bacchettare il titolo, perché di donne in queste 13 biografie c'è solo Delia Bacon, che è anche l'unica persona ad apparire rancorosa ed arrabbiata. Escludiamo poi William Henry Ireland, che costruisce falsi intenzionalmente (anche se arriva alla truffa per conquistare un po' di considerazione dal padre, che lo credeva un perfetto imbecille) e abbiamo 11 personaggi geniali. La loro colpa è spesso quella di essere nati nell'epoca sbagliata. Altre volte è solo sfortuna, o una filantropia innata che li porta a non essere capaci di monetizzare le proprie invenzioni oppure, semplicemente, hanno preso un gran bel granchio. Ma l'altro tratto comune è che ci credono, credono veramente nel loro progetto/idea/scoperta, tanto da non cambiare idea nemmeno di fronte alla rovina. Se avessero avuto successo li avremmo chiamati stoici, ma viste le catene di eventi ed avvisaglie che prevedevano chiaramente la sconfitta li consideriamo maniacali.
Alla fine ho deciso di non riportare qui nessun caso, nemmeno quelli che mi hanno divertito di più. Se state leggendo la recensione fatevi un favore e andate invece a leggere il libro: merita. Ci sono aneddoti estremamente attuali, affermazioni che sono scivolate fuori dalle pagine di volumoni rilegati in pelle e rieditati per il cyberspazio. Penso, per esempio, all'effetto placebo della luce blu, che all'apice della gloria curava tutti i mali e promuoveva la crescita di piante e d animali. Non è poi molto dissimile da quelle leggende metropolitane sul bicarbonato che cura il cancro o l'acqua diamante.
Buona lettura.
Cominciamo però a bacchettare il titolo, perché di donne in queste 13 biografie c'è solo Delia Bacon, che è anche l'unica persona ad apparire rancorosa ed arrabbiata. Escludiamo poi William Henry Ireland, che costruisce falsi intenzionalmente (anche se arriva alla truffa per conquistare un po' di considerazione dal padre, che lo credeva un perfetto imbecille) e abbiamo 11 personaggi geniali. La loro colpa è spesso quella di essere nati nell'epoca sbagliata. Altre volte è solo sfortuna, o una filantropia innata che li porta a non essere capaci di monetizzare le proprie invenzioni oppure, semplicemente, hanno preso un gran bel granchio. Ma l'altro tratto comune è che ci credono, credono veramente nel loro progetto/idea/scoperta, tanto da non cambiare idea nemmeno di fronte alla rovina. Se avessero avuto successo li avremmo chiamati stoici, ma viste le catene di eventi ed avvisaglie che prevedevano chiaramente la sconfitta li consideriamo maniacali.
Alla fine ho deciso di non riportare qui nessun caso, nemmeno quelli che mi hanno divertito di più. Se state leggendo la recensione fatevi un favore e andate invece a leggere il libro: merita. Ci sono aneddoti estremamente attuali, affermazioni che sono scivolate fuori dalle pagine di volumoni rilegati in pelle e rieditati per il cyberspazio. Penso, per esempio, all'effetto placebo della luce blu, che all'apice della gloria curava tutti i mali e promuoveva la crescita di piante e d animali. Non è poi molto dissimile da quelle leggende metropolitane sul bicarbonato che cura il cancro o l'acqua diamante.
Buona lettura.
November 8, 2020
This book is about people who were once famous but have vanished entirely from history, to the point where their names would not even be trivia questions anymore. It is exemplified by the British poet who in his youth was lauded alongside England’s greatest, but by his middle ages was considered hopelessly out of date and only fit for mockery and condescension, and whose works have now been out of print for over a hundred years.
We start with John Banvard who, after a hardscrabble youth, found his calling as a scenery painter, and invented an entirely new genre, the scrolling spectacle. His three mile painting (it was actually about 15,000 square feet rather than three linear miles) showed the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans. It was wrapped around large cylinders and slowly unrolled to Banvard’s narration and piano accompaniment, the very first “moving pictures” and decades before Thomas Edison’s motion picture cameras. It was a huge success, first in the midwest, then in the cities along the eastern seaboard, and finally a triumphant procession through the capitals of Europe. Banvard became the wealthiest and most famous painter of his age. His work, however, attracted many plagiarists and emulators, and eventually he retired to Long Island, where he built a mansion. He made the mistake of trying to go head to head with P.T. Barnum in the museum business and failed badly, and following other financial misfortunes he eventually lost everything and died penniless in a small town in South Dakota.
Next was William Henry Ireland, and undistinguished law clerk who became the greatest forger of his age. He started by forging a Shakespeare signature for his father, and eventually moved on to creating letters, legal documents, and finally, entirely new plays supposedly by the Bard. He was, however, a better forger than writer, with a writing style that sounded nothing like Elizabethan English, much less like Shakespeare, and he was eventually found out and discredited. Toward the end of his life his fraudulent pieces had become collector’s items themselves, and he was eventually selling forgeries of his own forgeries.
John Cleves Symmes was a bona fide hero of the War of 1812, and afterwards settled down to a comfortable life as a contractor for the Army. However, he believed the earth was hollow, and specifically that it contained a number of spheres one inside the other, each capable of supporting life, and that there were openings at the poles that would allow access to these newfound lands. The idea of a hollow earth was not new, but Symmes apparently thought it up entirely on his own. He tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to convince the U.S. Congress to fund polar expeditions. Others took up his idea and hollow earth became almost its own genre of fiction; Jules Verne wrote three books with it as a theme, and Edgar Allen Poe also used it as a plot device. It eventually inspired the self-proclaimed prophet Cyrus Reed Teed, who set up a religion with hollow earth at its core (although he believed we ourselves are in the center and the other spheres surround us). A prolific pamphleteer, Teed’s works had an afterlife in the kookier corners of Nazi pseudoscience.
René Blondlot was a respected scientist, chairman of the physics department at the University of Nancy, when he caught sight of an apparent glow out of the corner of his eye, and from there spun an elaborate theory of an entirely new form of radiation, N-rays, which were emitted by various organic and inorganic substances. It was the talk of the physics world, and numerous scientific papers discussed the provenance and effects of N-rays. Blondlot was awarded 50,000 francs by the French government and was assumed to be a front runner for the Nobel prize. Once examined more closely, however, N-rays were found to be just a trick of light in peripheral vision, and vanished from scientific literature almost overnight.
François Sudre created a language – a real language – using the eight tones of the standard musical scale. People trained in it could sing to one another and carry on conversations. It was never completed, and even if it had been the vocabulary would have been limited to about 76,000 words due to the constraints placed on it. Sudre is now long forgotten but there are people today who devote themselves to the philosophical or intellectual contemplation of music as communications.
Ephraim Bull developed the Concord grape. Native American wild grapes were small and not very palatable, and imported varieties quickly succumbed to diseases or pests. Bull spent several years laboriously planting grapes until he fortuitously produced one with large, sweet fruit. He started selling them but quickly found himself outcompeted by other growers who combined his vines with better business sense.
George Psalmanazar was a fraud. From a penniless lad he reinvented himself as a Taiwanese Christian convert. Since Taiwan might as well have been the moon at that time, his blond hair was no inconvenience. He invented a language and an alphabet, along with a history and religion, and wrote an outrageous best selling book about his “native” land. He was received into high society and was wined and dined by peers. Eventually his novelty wore off and, having experienced an apparently genuine religious conversion, he spent the rest of his life as a humble scribe. Interestingly, he was a close friend of Samuel Johnson, the great dictionarist, who preferred his conversation to almost anyone else he knew.
Alfred Ely Beach was a brilliant engineer who became the publisher of Scientific American magazine. Cities were becoming more and more crowded, and by the mid 1800s everyone was thinking of how to do mass transit, but steam locomotives were not going to work for underground railroads, and electricity was not yet advanced enough. Pneumatic systems had showed some progress in limited trials, and Beach stole a march on his competitors when he won a bid for an underground mail delivery system and enlarged it into something capable of carrying passengers. It was powered by a large fan which sent a single car down the tracks, and then, by reversing the fan blades, would suck the car back to its point of origin. It was an ingenious idea, and it worked in a limited prototype sort of way, but it could never be scaled up sufficiently to become true mass transit, and some of the problems it faced were insurmountable given the current state of technology.
Robert Coates was surely one of the most bizarre characters ever to appear on stage. Immensely rich from plantations in the Caribbean, he strutted around England in absurdly colored clothes studded with diamonds, on his hat, his buttons, his belt, and his shoe buckles. He also fancied himself a great actor, but he was a complete buffoon. Such was his high opinion of himself, however, that he brushed off criticism and seemed to think the jeering crowds were cheering him. His performances of Romeo were so over the top that theaters were filled to capacity with people who had come to see him smirk and bellow and depart from the script whenever it suited him. He was a specialist in death scenes, taking minutes to die in the most outrageous ways possible, and when the audience cheered he would rise from the dead and repeat the whole thing. At one point the actress playing Juliette had to rise from the dead herself and drag him off stage.
Martin Tupper was the poet I mentioned previously. His book Proverbial Philosophy was an enormous success, because it spoke to the people of its day with its sentimental prose poems and facile philosophizing. Expensive gilt editions became the gift to give for weddings, graduations, and special occasions, and lines from it could be found everywhere from dinnerware to tombstones. Unfortunately, it was also an easy style to parody, and as literature moved on Tupper came to be seen as impossibly simple-minded and dated. He has fallen so far from public view that even anthologies of poetry do not include him, though he was for several decades the best selling poet in the world, and almost became poet laureate of England. He was also a genuinely decent person, often visiting prisons and asylums to read to the inmates and assist where he could, and from this detail I learned that London today has a prison with the Harry Potter-esque name of Wormword Scrubs.
Augustus Pleasonton had been a Union general in the Civil War, and became fascinated with blue light. He conducted experiments that seemed to show that plants and animals raised under it grew faster, stronger, and healthier. He published his results and soon there was a craze for blue glass. The charlatans followed, of course, and the year 1877 saw a frenzy of blue light as regular glass panes were replaced by blue ones, some people inferred religious significance, and things started to get seriously crazy. Then the scientists came along and spoiled the party, showing that blue light is just – light – and has no special healing properties. As fast as it appeared, the blue light craze vanished.
Delia Bacon is the most tragic person in this book. Raised in very difficult circumstances, she educated herself to a position of prominence in the the intellectual community as a widely respected lecturer and teacher. Somewhere along the way she became convinced that the works of Shakespeare were not written by that “fourth rate actor,” but must have been the collaborative work of Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon. She was given a grant to go to England for a year to research her thesis, and stayed longer, increasingly impoverished and slowly descending into madness. She eventually produced a 600 page book which is the unreadable meanderings of a mind which has lost its way. She died in an asylum.
The final story is of Thomas Dick, a respected church minister, astronomer, and writer who built his own observatory and played host to many of the great scientific minds of his day. His religious beliefs convinced him that intelligent life must exist everywhere, even on the sun, the moon, and the outer planets, because why would God have created all those things without making creatures who could then perpetually praise His celestial glory? Dick’s scientific credentials were diminished by his faith, because he rejected any theories that did not include God as the first and final cause. His stature was further reduced when jokers created a series of widely read newspaper articles which claimed that a new telescope was able to see plants, animals, and four foot tall bat-winged people cavorting around on the moon.
Some of these stories were interesting, and it’s always good to be able to see the world as earlier people saw it. However, there is not much to be learned from this book, no overarching narrative or lessons about science, literature, or humanity, and a tenor of sadness runs through the stories, of fame and fortune lost, of bad timing or bad luck, of madness and megalomania. There were times when I felt embarrassed to be reading it, since most of the subjects were sincere in their beliefs and, while they might have been wrong, most of them did not deserve the ridicule that came upon them before they were cast into obscurity.
We start with John Banvard who, after a hardscrabble youth, found his calling as a scenery painter, and invented an entirely new genre, the scrolling spectacle. His three mile painting (it was actually about 15,000 square feet rather than three linear miles) showed the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans. It was wrapped around large cylinders and slowly unrolled to Banvard’s narration and piano accompaniment, the very first “moving pictures” and decades before Thomas Edison’s motion picture cameras. It was a huge success, first in the midwest, then in the cities along the eastern seaboard, and finally a triumphant procession through the capitals of Europe. Banvard became the wealthiest and most famous painter of his age. His work, however, attracted many plagiarists and emulators, and eventually he retired to Long Island, where he built a mansion. He made the mistake of trying to go head to head with P.T. Barnum in the museum business and failed badly, and following other financial misfortunes he eventually lost everything and died penniless in a small town in South Dakota.
Next was William Henry Ireland, and undistinguished law clerk who became the greatest forger of his age. He started by forging a Shakespeare signature for his father, and eventually moved on to creating letters, legal documents, and finally, entirely new plays supposedly by the Bard. He was, however, a better forger than writer, with a writing style that sounded nothing like Elizabethan English, much less like Shakespeare, and he was eventually found out and discredited. Toward the end of his life his fraudulent pieces had become collector’s items themselves, and he was eventually selling forgeries of his own forgeries.
John Cleves Symmes was a bona fide hero of the War of 1812, and afterwards settled down to a comfortable life as a contractor for the Army. However, he believed the earth was hollow, and specifically that it contained a number of spheres one inside the other, each capable of supporting life, and that there were openings at the poles that would allow access to these newfound lands. The idea of a hollow earth was not new, but Symmes apparently thought it up entirely on his own. He tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to convince the U.S. Congress to fund polar expeditions. Others took up his idea and hollow earth became almost its own genre of fiction; Jules Verne wrote three books with it as a theme, and Edgar Allen Poe also used it as a plot device. It eventually inspired the self-proclaimed prophet Cyrus Reed Teed, who set up a religion with hollow earth at its core (although he believed we ourselves are in the center and the other spheres surround us). A prolific pamphleteer, Teed’s works had an afterlife in the kookier corners of Nazi pseudoscience.
René Blondlot was a respected scientist, chairman of the physics department at the University of Nancy, when he caught sight of an apparent glow out of the corner of his eye, and from there spun an elaborate theory of an entirely new form of radiation, N-rays, which were emitted by various organic and inorganic substances. It was the talk of the physics world, and numerous scientific papers discussed the provenance and effects of N-rays. Blondlot was awarded 50,000 francs by the French government and was assumed to be a front runner for the Nobel prize. Once examined more closely, however, N-rays were found to be just a trick of light in peripheral vision, and vanished from scientific literature almost overnight.
François Sudre created a language – a real language – using the eight tones of the standard musical scale. People trained in it could sing to one another and carry on conversations. It was never completed, and even if it had been the vocabulary would have been limited to about 76,000 words due to the constraints placed on it. Sudre is now long forgotten but there are people today who devote themselves to the philosophical or intellectual contemplation of music as communications.
Ephraim Bull developed the Concord grape. Native American wild grapes were small and not very palatable, and imported varieties quickly succumbed to diseases or pests. Bull spent several years laboriously planting grapes until he fortuitously produced one with large, sweet fruit. He started selling them but quickly found himself outcompeted by other growers who combined his vines with better business sense.
George Psalmanazar was a fraud. From a penniless lad he reinvented himself as a Taiwanese Christian convert. Since Taiwan might as well have been the moon at that time, his blond hair was no inconvenience. He invented a language and an alphabet, along with a history and religion, and wrote an outrageous best selling book about his “native” land. He was received into high society and was wined and dined by peers. Eventually his novelty wore off and, having experienced an apparently genuine religious conversion, he spent the rest of his life as a humble scribe. Interestingly, he was a close friend of Samuel Johnson, the great dictionarist, who preferred his conversation to almost anyone else he knew.
Alfred Ely Beach was a brilliant engineer who became the publisher of Scientific American magazine. Cities were becoming more and more crowded, and by the mid 1800s everyone was thinking of how to do mass transit, but steam locomotives were not going to work for underground railroads, and electricity was not yet advanced enough. Pneumatic systems had showed some progress in limited trials, and Beach stole a march on his competitors when he won a bid for an underground mail delivery system and enlarged it into something capable of carrying passengers. It was powered by a large fan which sent a single car down the tracks, and then, by reversing the fan blades, would suck the car back to its point of origin. It was an ingenious idea, and it worked in a limited prototype sort of way, but it could never be scaled up sufficiently to become true mass transit, and some of the problems it faced were insurmountable given the current state of technology.
Robert Coates was surely one of the most bizarre characters ever to appear on stage. Immensely rich from plantations in the Caribbean, he strutted around England in absurdly colored clothes studded with diamonds, on his hat, his buttons, his belt, and his shoe buckles. He also fancied himself a great actor, but he was a complete buffoon. Such was his high opinion of himself, however, that he brushed off criticism and seemed to think the jeering crowds were cheering him. His performances of Romeo were so over the top that theaters were filled to capacity with people who had come to see him smirk and bellow and depart from the script whenever it suited him. He was a specialist in death scenes, taking minutes to die in the most outrageous ways possible, and when the audience cheered he would rise from the dead and repeat the whole thing. At one point the actress playing Juliette had to rise from the dead herself and drag him off stage.
Martin Tupper was the poet I mentioned previously. His book Proverbial Philosophy was an enormous success, because it spoke to the people of its day with its sentimental prose poems and facile philosophizing. Expensive gilt editions became the gift to give for weddings, graduations, and special occasions, and lines from it could be found everywhere from dinnerware to tombstones. Unfortunately, it was also an easy style to parody, and as literature moved on Tupper came to be seen as impossibly simple-minded and dated. He has fallen so far from public view that even anthologies of poetry do not include him, though he was for several decades the best selling poet in the world, and almost became poet laureate of England. He was also a genuinely decent person, often visiting prisons and asylums to read to the inmates and assist where he could, and from this detail I learned that London today has a prison with the Harry Potter-esque name of Wormword Scrubs.
Augustus Pleasonton had been a Union general in the Civil War, and became fascinated with blue light. He conducted experiments that seemed to show that plants and animals raised under it grew faster, stronger, and healthier. He published his results and soon there was a craze for blue glass. The charlatans followed, of course, and the year 1877 saw a frenzy of blue light as regular glass panes were replaced by blue ones, some people inferred religious significance, and things started to get seriously crazy. Then the scientists came along and spoiled the party, showing that blue light is just – light – and has no special healing properties. As fast as it appeared, the blue light craze vanished.
Delia Bacon is the most tragic person in this book. Raised in very difficult circumstances, she educated herself to a position of prominence in the the intellectual community as a widely respected lecturer and teacher. Somewhere along the way she became convinced that the works of Shakespeare were not written by that “fourth rate actor,” but must have been the collaborative work of Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon. She was given a grant to go to England for a year to research her thesis, and stayed longer, increasingly impoverished and slowly descending into madness. She eventually produced a 600 page book which is the unreadable meanderings of a mind which has lost its way. She died in an asylum.
The final story is of Thomas Dick, a respected church minister, astronomer, and writer who built his own observatory and played host to many of the great scientific minds of his day. His religious beliefs convinced him that intelligent life must exist everywhere, even on the sun, the moon, and the outer planets, because why would God have created all those things without making creatures who could then perpetually praise His celestial glory? Dick’s scientific credentials were diminished by his faith, because he rejected any theories that did not include God as the first and final cause. His stature was further reduced when jokers created a series of widely read newspaper articles which claimed that a new telescope was able to see plants, animals, and four foot tall bat-winged people cavorting around on the moon.
Some of these stories were interesting, and it’s always good to be able to see the world as earlier people saw it. However, there is not much to be learned from this book, no overarching narrative or lessons about science, literature, or humanity, and a tenor of sadness runs through the stories, of fame and fortune lost, of bad timing or bad luck, of madness and megalomania. There were times when I felt embarrassed to be reading it, since most of the subjects were sincere in their beliefs and, while they might have been wrong, most of them did not deserve the ridicule that came upon them before they were cast into obscurity.
February 7, 2019
Problemi di messa a fuoco
Titolo curioso ed enigmatico.
Recensioni che incuriosiscono.
Quarta di copertina che promette bene, "tredici... microromanzi ilari e sorprendenti". Ci fidiamo perché è Adelphi.
Bene, leggiamolo.
You had me at preface
Introducendo l'opera, Collins incuriosisce con la sua curiosità verso i diversamente famosi: leggendo un documento del passato, scrive, la maggior parte delle persone prova un brivido se si imbatte in un nome noto, in un personaggio celebre. Lui no: lui è più interessato "alle altre persone", agli Illustri Sconosciuti, che, giunti alla soglia della scoperta fondamentale o della fama, ricadono nell'oblio.
In realtà, vien da appuntare, i tredici non-eroi di Collins non sono esattamente altra gente: nella maggior parte dei casi sono personaggi che sono stati famosi per un limitato periodo di tempo, un po' come i Jalisse. Sicuramente i più non intendevano cambiare il mondo, ma migliorare - anche con truffe e inganni - la propria esistenza: agli uni e agli altri non è andata troppo bene. Però è difficile trovare un vero e proprio legame tra il Banvard del titolo, pittore a suo tempo celeberrimo che si rovinò tentando di emulare Barnum, e il grande falsario Ireland, novello Shakespeare. O col simpatico Symmes, fautore della "Terra cava" (lui sì mirava a cambiare la Storia), che ringraziamo quantomeno per aver ispirato Poe e Verne - ma vallo a spiegare ai terrapiattisti...
Mio personale eroe, tra i magnifici tredici, è Jean François Sudre, ideatore di un genialmente folle linguaggio musicale, il Solresol, che mi ha ricordato l'idioma analitico di John Wilkins (grazie ancora, J.L. Borges).
Lettura piacevole, questa. E buon nutrimento per la mia curiosità (ma lo stesso potrei dire di alcune rubriche de La Settimana Enigmistica). Solo, mi aspettavo di trovare la storia di veri sconosciuti, vere altre persone, quelle che lasciano - quando si è fortunati - qualche manciata di orme nella grande distesa della documentazione. Non il più famoso abitante di Formosa del XVIII secolo, o il più celebre pittore della metà dell'Ottocento.
Attenuante specifica
Questo commento è pesantemente influenzato dall'aver dedicato anni - futilmente - a cercare tracce di personaggi ai tempi famosi e fumosi. Ovvero: avere a che fare con la lacunosa documentazione del '200 genera invidia verso l'abbondanza dei secoli successivi.
Titolo curioso ed enigmatico.
Recensioni che incuriosiscono.
Quarta di copertina che promette bene, "tredici... microromanzi ilari e sorprendenti". Ci fidiamo perché è Adelphi.
Bene, leggiamolo.
You had me at preface
Introducendo l'opera, Collins incuriosisce con la sua curiosità verso i diversamente famosi: leggendo un documento del passato, scrive, la maggior parte delle persone prova un brivido se si imbatte in un nome noto, in un personaggio celebre. Lui no: lui è più interessato "alle altre persone", agli Illustri Sconosciuti, che, giunti alla soglia della scoperta fondamentale o della fama, ricadono nell'oblio.
In realtà, vien da appuntare, i tredici non-eroi di Collins non sono esattamente altra gente: nella maggior parte dei casi sono personaggi che sono stati famosi per un limitato periodo di tempo, un po' come i Jalisse. Sicuramente i più non intendevano cambiare il mondo, ma migliorare - anche con truffe e inganni - la propria esistenza: agli uni e agli altri non è andata troppo bene. Però è difficile trovare un vero e proprio legame tra il Banvard del titolo, pittore a suo tempo celeberrimo che si rovinò tentando di emulare Barnum, e il grande falsario Ireland, novello Shakespeare. O col simpatico Symmes, fautore della "Terra cava" (lui sì mirava a cambiare la Storia), che ringraziamo quantomeno per aver ispirato Poe e Verne - ma vallo a spiegare ai terrapiattisti...
Mio personale eroe, tra i magnifici tredici, è Jean François Sudre, ideatore di un genialmente folle linguaggio musicale, il Solresol, che mi ha ricordato l'idioma analitico di John Wilkins (grazie ancora, J.L. Borges).
Lettura piacevole, questa. E buon nutrimento per la mia curiosità (ma lo stesso potrei dire di alcune rubriche de La Settimana Enigmistica). Solo, mi aspettavo di trovare la storia di veri sconosciuti, vere altre persone, quelle che lasciano - quando si è fortunati - qualche manciata di orme nella grande distesa della documentazione. Non il più famoso abitante di Formosa del XVIII secolo, o il più celebre pittore della metà dell'Ottocento.
Attenuante specifica
Questo commento è pesantemente influenzato dall'aver dedicato anni - futilmente - a cercare tracce di personaggi ai tempi famosi e fumosi. Ovvero: avere a che fare con la lacunosa documentazione del '200 genera invidia verso l'abbondanza dei secoli successivi.
March 4, 2008
Everyone knows about famous people. That’s why they’re called famous. But what of all those people who accomplished great things, made great strides, and then were simply forgotten? That’s what Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World sets out to answer. The book chronicles the lives of thirteen interesting individuals who tried hard enough, but, for one reason or another, became nothing more than a footnote in history – if they’re lucky. Most notable among the stories is that of Ephraim Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape. Bull, the first to breed a hardy, sweet grape in America, was sure he would become enormously wealthy selling his grapes. The issue? More established farmers bought his grapes the first season and made their own. Or, consider was Rene Blondlot, a French scientist who became a worldwide sensation when he discovered a new kind of radiation he named N-Rays. Unfortunately, it was found out that Blondlot had simply been faking his results all along, and other scientists simply agreed because they didn’t want to look stupid. He was found out just months before he was expected to win the 1904 Nobel Prize. Banvard’s other stories are just as interesting (if not flat out ridiculous) accounts of people throughout history, some of whom were smart but unlucky, and others who were simply the Milli Vanillis of their day.
September 27, 2022
I loved this book - it is my list of books to buy - what could you not like about a book that:
'...is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells...'
Considering how many absolutely awful people are remembered it is lovely to revive, if only for a moment, these harmless, but likeable, people who are so unfortunately forgotten instead of the monsters who remain in our memories.
I can't praise it enough.
'...is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells...'
Considering how many absolutely awful people are remembered it is lovely to revive, if only for a moment, these harmless, but likeable, people who are so unfortunately forgotten instead of the monsters who remain in our memories.
I can't praise it enough.
August 6, 2020
Ever hear of the musical language Solresol? When was the last time you read the works of Martin Tupper? If you haven't and your curious this is the book for you. Nice selection of biographies of people who deserve to more than just footnotes. Too often ,especially in public schools, history is presented as one long string of triumphs this book offers a nice antidote to that. Those looking for an excersize in schadenfreude should look elsewhere Collins treats these ecentric individuals ,whom most people whould dismiss as abject failures, with a great deal of deserved sympathy
November 29, 2017
Io li inviterei tutti a cena.
Avremmo ottima uva, intrattenimento teatrale e musicale, discettazioni letterarie e filosofiche (con una predilezione per Shakespeare, e una probabile rissa), resoconti di Paesi lontani, dimostrazioni scientifiche e mediche. E, per finire, ci faremmo fare tutti un ritratto - gigantesco, come era costume del signor Banvard.
E se anche la maggior parte di questi intrattenimenti si rivelasse campata in aria... l'importante è la compagnia, no?
Un libro stupendo: tredici vite folli e appassionate, raccontate con garbo e ironia, ma senza la derisione che molti di questi geni (a modo loro) raccolsero in vita.
Avremmo ottima uva, intrattenimento teatrale e musicale, discettazioni letterarie e filosofiche (con una predilezione per Shakespeare, e una probabile rissa), resoconti di Paesi lontani, dimostrazioni scientifiche e mediche. E, per finire, ci faremmo fare tutti un ritratto - gigantesco, come era costume del signor Banvard.
E se anche la maggior parte di questi intrattenimenti si rivelasse campata in aria... l'importante è la compagnia, no?
Un libro stupendo: tredici vite folli e appassionate, raccontate con garbo e ironia, ma senza la derisione che molti di questi geni (a modo loro) raccolsero in vita.
October 22, 2016
An uneven, not quite cohesive collection of essays.
Paul Collins opens these thirteen pieces with a very short introduction. He says that he wanted to write about people with grand ambitions, but who failed--people who were once famous, or at least, perhaps, talked about, but are only remembered now by those with an antiquarian cast of mind. It's the only thing tying the book together, the introduction, and even it doesn't quite capture what is going on here.
Take the first three stories: one about John Banvard, who, during the 19th century, was a very famous and very rich artist, having innovated panoramic displays, but who then lost his money and was forgotten by American culture; one about William Henry Ireland, who created a legion of fake Shakespeare documents in late 18th- and early 19th-century London, before being exposed; and one about John Cleve Symmes, a 19th-century American army officer, who wrote treatises showing that the earth was hollow.
Tying these together as people who "didn't change the world"--as the subtitle has it--doesn't quite capture what was going on. Symmes is probably the only one who can be said to want to change the world--not just physically, by inventing a hollow core, but intellectually, in the way it is thought about. And, as it happens, he's the most well-known of the triumvirate, object of attention by a host of fringe theorists.
The other two, Banvard--who gives the book its title--and Ireland, were trying to make a buck and prove their worth to a distant father, respectively. That they gained some notoriety in the process does not mean that they were trying to make themselves into world-historical figures, or change the course of human culture. That they are forgotten puts them in the same category as most of humanity.
There's a certain condescension here, wrapped though in sweetness. It's not a surprise, then, that Collins, and some of the essays here, were connected with Dave Eggers and McSweeney's--whose house style, as best as I can determine, tends to mix the schmaltzy with the patronizing, one covering the other. Collins can be a bit bitchy in the endnotes--dismissing books as having the air of the dissertation about them or for being self-indulgent (rich, for a guy whose bio includes that he wrote for eCompany Now), but he keeps this under wraps during the essays, which do show a light touch.
He can write, and he has (seemingly) done his research. The essays breeze by, bagatelles, with no obvious unity, aside from one or two small attempts by Collins to link events in one episode with those of another. As they proceed, they get more and more loose, the subjects sometimes obscured in their own stories. Collins measures these people on a strict scale, especially those who offered alternative scientific theories: this meant that they were deluded or pathological, in his reckoning.
Having gone through these, though, I do notice a unifying theme; it's not perfect--there are exceptions, as well as caveats--and I am not sure that Collins himself is aware of it, but it works.
Back in 1931, Constance Rourke wrote a book-length essay "American Humor," identifying three stock characters. One of these was the Yankee Peddler, who would come into distant towns, tell stories, sometimes sleep with the farmer's daughter--before skedaddling--and always had some new gadget or innovative thing on offer, though these could just as often be a hoax. Think of "The Music Man."
Or, think of most of these characters. True enough, not all of them are Americans--but they are being told by an American for a mostly American audience, and, I think their stories are shaped to fit the pattern of the Yankee Peddler. He innovated for no good reason, causing a ruckus, before order was restored.
The model does not fit for Rene Blondlot and his N-Rays (a story that is not obscure, either, nor is Blondlot forgotten), which is more about the blindness of the too-serious man. (In fact, he's undone by the Yankee sharp.) It also doesn't work as well for another French man, Jean Paul Sudre, and his universal musical language. But so many of these others follow the tradition: Banvard, obviously, and Ireland; Ephraim Bull and his Concord Grapes (which story sounds like something Paul Harvey would have recounted); the mysterious Psalamanazar; Alfred Beach and his pneumatic tube, progenitor of the modern subway system; A J Pleasanton and his blue glass panacea; Delia Bacon and her heterodox theories about Shakespeare's plays--actually written, she said, by her namesake, Francis Bacon; and all those involved with the various space hoaxes of the 19th and early 20th centuries: luna civilizations and Martian canals.
The book is not so much a testament to failure and loss, but to the opposite impulse: gaining, even at the expense--perhaps especially at the expense--of others.
Paul Collins opens these thirteen pieces with a very short introduction. He says that he wanted to write about people with grand ambitions, but who failed--people who were once famous, or at least, perhaps, talked about, but are only remembered now by those with an antiquarian cast of mind. It's the only thing tying the book together, the introduction, and even it doesn't quite capture what is going on here.
Take the first three stories: one about John Banvard, who, during the 19th century, was a very famous and very rich artist, having innovated panoramic displays, but who then lost his money and was forgotten by American culture; one about William Henry Ireland, who created a legion of fake Shakespeare documents in late 18th- and early 19th-century London, before being exposed; and one about John Cleve Symmes, a 19th-century American army officer, who wrote treatises showing that the earth was hollow.
Tying these together as people who "didn't change the world"--as the subtitle has it--doesn't quite capture what was going on. Symmes is probably the only one who can be said to want to change the world--not just physically, by inventing a hollow core, but intellectually, in the way it is thought about. And, as it happens, he's the most well-known of the triumvirate, object of attention by a host of fringe theorists.
The other two, Banvard--who gives the book its title--and Ireland, were trying to make a buck and prove their worth to a distant father, respectively. That they gained some notoriety in the process does not mean that they were trying to make themselves into world-historical figures, or change the course of human culture. That they are forgotten puts them in the same category as most of humanity.
There's a certain condescension here, wrapped though in sweetness. It's not a surprise, then, that Collins, and some of the essays here, were connected with Dave Eggers and McSweeney's--whose house style, as best as I can determine, tends to mix the schmaltzy with the patronizing, one covering the other. Collins can be a bit bitchy in the endnotes--dismissing books as having the air of the dissertation about them or for being self-indulgent (rich, for a guy whose bio includes that he wrote for eCompany Now), but he keeps this under wraps during the essays, which do show a light touch.
He can write, and he has (seemingly) done his research. The essays breeze by, bagatelles, with no obvious unity, aside from one or two small attempts by Collins to link events in one episode with those of another. As they proceed, they get more and more loose, the subjects sometimes obscured in their own stories. Collins measures these people on a strict scale, especially those who offered alternative scientific theories: this meant that they were deluded or pathological, in his reckoning.
Having gone through these, though, I do notice a unifying theme; it's not perfect--there are exceptions, as well as caveats--and I am not sure that Collins himself is aware of it, but it works.
Back in 1931, Constance Rourke wrote a book-length essay "American Humor," identifying three stock characters. One of these was the Yankee Peddler, who would come into distant towns, tell stories, sometimes sleep with the farmer's daughter--before skedaddling--and always had some new gadget or innovative thing on offer, though these could just as often be a hoax. Think of "The Music Man."
Or, think of most of these characters. True enough, not all of them are Americans--but they are being told by an American for a mostly American audience, and, I think their stories are shaped to fit the pattern of the Yankee Peddler. He innovated for no good reason, causing a ruckus, before order was restored.
The model does not fit for Rene Blondlot and his N-Rays (a story that is not obscure, either, nor is Blondlot forgotten), which is more about the blindness of the too-serious man. (In fact, he's undone by the Yankee sharp.) It also doesn't work as well for another French man, Jean Paul Sudre, and his universal musical language. But so many of these others follow the tradition: Banvard, obviously, and Ireland; Ephraim Bull and his Concord Grapes (which story sounds like something Paul Harvey would have recounted); the mysterious Psalamanazar; Alfred Beach and his pneumatic tube, progenitor of the modern subway system; A J Pleasanton and his blue glass panacea; Delia Bacon and her heterodox theories about Shakespeare's plays--actually written, she said, by her namesake, Francis Bacon; and all those involved with the various space hoaxes of the 19th and early 20th centuries: luna civilizations and Martian canals.
The book is not so much a testament to failure and loss, but to the opposite impulse: gaining, even at the expense--perhaps especially at the expense--of others.
October 10, 2017
Divertissement assai interessante, situato storicamente nei paesi anglosassoni, perlopiù tra il 1600 ed il 1800. R.W.Emerson appare spesso, come comparsa. Chissà se vuol dire qualcosa...
Saggio che diventa morale laddove illustra come il genio non sia nulla senza avvedutezza e onestà.
Ce lo si augura anche a proposito dei (geniali) finanzieri e dei (geniali) politicanti italioti di ultima razza.
Saggio che diventa morale laddove illustra come il genio non sia nulla senza avvedutezza e onestà.
Ce lo si augura anche a proposito dei (geniali) finanzieri e dei (geniali) politicanti italioti di ultima razza.
May 2, 2021
At some point of the Parks and Recreation sitcom, the character Tom publishes a book called something like "Failure - a Success Story". The message of the book, as well as the whole episode and the story arc of Tom himself, is that failure is good - to succeed you need to try and if you try, you'll fail. This is also a topic of a lot of self-help initiatives, trying to help us overcome the ingrained prejudice that success is the only possibility. Paul Collins contributes to this whole discussion in a different but fascinating way by exploring historical failures one has not heard about.
Banvard's Folly contains stories of 13 people who gave it their best in life but ended up dead and forgotten. Some of them have had an easier time before that, some did less well but all of them share the fate of being ultimately wrong or unrewarded. The stories remind us that yes, there are Larry Pages and Bill Gateses out there that will hit it big, as well as there are Florence Foster Jenkinses, whose failures become famous, but for each and every one of these there is a crowd of people that were just a bit less lucky and, as the title says, did not change the world. The book reminds us that failure is a part of life, that one needs to give it their best and, well, a lot of it comes down to (bad) luck.
Banvard's Folly is a delightful and a not overly long read that will make you a star of any nerdy party. For added points, make sure to read through the recommended literature at the end, which, among a lot of good advice, contains gems of humour that are rare to see in these parts of books.
Banvard's Folly contains stories of 13 people who gave it their best in life but ended up dead and forgotten. Some of them have had an easier time before that, some did less well but all of them share the fate of being ultimately wrong or unrewarded. The stories remind us that yes, there are Larry Pages and Bill Gateses out there that will hit it big, as well as there are Florence Foster Jenkinses, whose failures become famous, but for each and every one of these there is a crowd of people that were just a bit less lucky and, as the title says, did not change the world. The book reminds us that failure is a part of life, that one needs to give it their best and, well, a lot of it comes down to (bad) luck.
Banvard's Folly is a delightful and a not overly long read that will make you a star of any nerdy party. For added points, make sure to read through the recommended literature at the end, which, among a lot of good advice, contains gems of humour that are rare to see in these parts of books.
April 7, 2020
This ended up being SUCH a mixed bag for me. Some chapters I genuinely had fun with, but then again it was too much of a miscellaneous collection for me, especially since there were parts that totally failed to hold my interest. It’s more of a 2.5 but really, it’s right in the middle of the scale because I don’t know what to make of it as a whole.
Read
August 25, 2024Dnf
Shelved as 'tbr-non-fiction'
May 11, 2017QI 61
September 6, 2007
A pass-along from my mom, Banvard's Folly has been on my Imminent To Read list for quite some time & I finally picked it up earlier this week.
As the subtitle says, the book is a collection of articles about men & women who had (or attempted to have) a brief moment of fame and have since faded into obscurity. Collins' subjects come from many different walks of life - artists, scientists, writers, and actors. Not only does Collins tell their stories, he looks at what, if any impact they had on the modern day. He also credits his references in a section called Further Readings.
The subject of the title was an artist who created huge panoramic scenery canvases that would be unrolled in front of an audience while a narrator explained the scene or gave a travelogue. This was the closest thing to moving pictures before the turn of the century, with his most famous canvas being of the Mississippi river, called "The Three Mile Painting".
Other colorful characters include a "dullard" who forged Shakespeare documents, one of the first proponents of the Hollow Earth/Concentric Spheres theory, and a proponent of the healing properties of blue light. (no, his name wasn't Kresge :^) ) Collins treats each subject with dignity, while showing their foibles; I got the feeling he sympathized with each and every one of them.
Recommended to those with an interest in the lesser-known aspects of history.
As the subtitle says, the book is a collection of articles about men & women who had (or attempted to have) a brief moment of fame and have since faded into obscurity. Collins' subjects come from many different walks of life - artists, scientists, writers, and actors. Not only does Collins tell their stories, he looks at what, if any impact they had on the modern day. He also credits his references in a section called Further Readings.
The subject of the title was an artist who created huge panoramic scenery canvases that would be unrolled in front of an audience while a narrator explained the scene or gave a travelogue. This was the closest thing to moving pictures before the turn of the century, with his most famous canvas being of the Mississippi river, called "The Three Mile Painting".
Other colorful characters include a "dullard" who forged Shakespeare documents, one of the first proponents of the Hollow Earth/Concentric Spheres theory, and a proponent of the healing properties of blue light. (no, his name wasn't Kresge :^) ) Collins treats each subject with dignity, while showing their foibles; I got the feeling he sympathized with each and every one of them.
Recommended to those with an interest in the lesser-known aspects of history.
February 25, 2011
History is written by the winners. Or at least about the winners. There’s no shortage of tributes to, say, Shakespeare or Einstein. But what about the losers? Happily, there’s Paul Collins—a great and, I think, under-appreciated writer—who in Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World, brings to life a group of people who were famous in their own day, but for various reasons have been completely forgotten. The best-known (if that’s the right word) of Collins’ anti-heroes is Delia Bacon, who was renowned on two continents for her brilliantly erudite lectures, but went mad, and in the process invented the Francis Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays theory. (She and Francis were unrelated, though late in her life she seems to have forgotten this.) Martin Farquhar Tupper was a famous writer of revoltingly treacly Victorian poetry, strangely much admired by Walt Whitman. René Blondlot was a brilliant scientist who believed that he had discovered N-rays. Collins manages to evoke sympathy for his hapless protagonists, though it’s perhaps not unmixed with schadenfreude. Still, in this deeply fun book, they finally have the last word.
February 26, 2017
Il sottotitolo di questo libro è "13 storie di persone che non hanno cambiato il mondo"... perché interessarsene dunque? Paul Collins ci fa rivivere le esistenze di personaggi bislacchi e genialoidi che sono riusciti per un brevissimo periodo della loro vita ad assurgere ad apparente immortalità per poi cadere nel dimenticatoio. Ogni racconto ci svela un mondo di credenze e cultura che hanno destato un interesse inaspettato nel pubblico dei tempi andati, dandoci anche un bellissimo quadro del nostro mondo nel '700 e nell'800. E quindi lasciatevi trasportare anche voi da diorami, luce blu, buchi nella terra, raggi N, falsificatori, metropolitane pneumatiche e quant'altro!
December 17, 2014
What a quirky book. Stories of 13 people who were unique and somewhat infamous (in the day) but absolutely unknown now. I found myself comparing this book (and author) to my hero - the historian Daniel Boorstin - who has entertained me with incredibly detailed stories about people, events, and things which are everyday and all around us, but about whom and what you haven't a clue.
August 23, 2021
Hilarious. Not only that, some useful tips on how not to follow in the footsteps of creative failures. If I taught business school, this would be required reading. My favorite chapter involves a pneumatic subway station that was secretly built under City Hall.
March 6, 2014
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 6, 2011
Once the world's most famous painter, John Banvard died penniless - why? The stories of forgotten people read by Andrew Sachs.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 4, 2018
Paul Collins wrote in Sixpence House that he was working on this book while still living in Hay on Wye, Wales. He had the title, which is actually the title of the first story, and was struggling with other editorial decisions at the time. The amount of research that went into this book was as interesting to me as the stories themselves: "Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck." Paul Collins has continued to write and edit this type of material, and now lives in SE Portland. I've had to go back and reread several of the stories when I've wanted to share them in conversation, and I've enjoyed the reading and the telling every time.
May 31, 2018
I love this kind of book. Fun explorations into the obscure and dead. Each essay has a gripping introduction and a poetic ending. The book isn’t irrelevant, if any thing the author is excited and proud to tell these long lost stories. These are stories about genius and what can squander it. Insanity, religion, and scoundrels etc.
What I learned: The son of the publisher of the moon hoax, ran scientific American and built an underground pneumatic subway in secret! (And invented a typewriter) Poe probably died of rabies!
What I learned: The son of the publisher of the moon hoax, ran scientific American and built an underground pneumatic subway in secret! (And invented a typewriter) Poe probably died of rabies!
November 21, 2020
I have been reading this for 3-4 years now so it is so satisfying to finally finish! Perfect book if you'd like a little snippet of different histories and forgotten stories. The name dropping is fantastic, with famous people popping up in each tale, from PT Barnum, to Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
A little wordy at times (I think you have to be when discussing natural theology) but overall the variety of the stories is highly entertaining and a great book to read a chapter at a time every few months.
A little wordy at times (I think you have to be when discussing natural theology) but overall the variety of the stories is highly entertaining and a great book to read a chapter at a time every few months.
November 19, 2022
I was reading Shoe Dog and got irritated by the mega ego, obsessed, boundary-line maniacal pursuit of the typical American founders. What is it with these guys and desperately seeking glory and wanting to "change the world". Why is it considered so great?
This book is like an antidote to that. People who were just as brilliant, hard-working and obsessed. But did not change anything. For every successful person's biography that you read, read one story from this book.
This book is like an antidote to that. People who were just as brilliant, hard-working and obsessed. But did not change anything. For every successful person's biography that you read, read one story from this book.
October 22, 2023
The title tells it all - 13 essays about people you never heard of, for one reason or another. Some were ingenious, some left legacies (Concord grapes for example) and the rest were nutty, dishonest, or otherwise in the wrong place at the wrong century. The essays are fun to pick up here and there between other reads. Certainly interesting.
September 11, 2017
Those one-sentence that's-all-you-need-to-know-reader paragraphs get obnoxious really quickly, and he doesn't have quite the insight into human nature that he thinks he does.
That being said, I couldn't put the book down, and I'd read 39 more of these tales written by the author.
That being said, I couldn't put the book down, and I'd read 39 more of these tales written by the author.
August 22, 2019
when it comes to a book like this, the best sign that it succeeded is if it leaves you wishing you could read full-length biographies of the subjects. i'm pleased to report that was very often the case with Banvard's Folly. consistently engaging and engrossing.
April 19, 2020
Delightful stories about obscure, amazing, strange people who were often vastly famous in their own time but in a century or two became entirely forgotten. The last couple entries are very much lesser, but the book is still great overall.
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